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  "Well, boy?" McKully grinned. "Got the belly fer it, or don't'cha?"

  "Shee-it... " Balls ruminated on his thoughts, and then it occurred to him that he didn't give jack-fuck about this unfortunate soul at his feet. Innocent? Absolutely! But could Balls really kill her—kill her down and dirty-like? Could he lay a genuine "ruckin'" on her?

  Balls' epiphany was now at hand.

  "Dicky! Come gimme a hand!"

  "Uh, uh, well—"

  "Just come on!"

  Dicky moseyed over, hands in pockets.

  Balls shook his head when an inadvertent glance showed him the baby eating McKully's jettisoned splat of mucus. These really are some crackers here, he thought. Then he whipped out his Buck knife and snapped! it open. He straddled the emaciated woman and cut off her gag.

  She wheezed like a kazoo. "Jaysus, Mary'n Joseph lemme go my God please lemme go! I ain't gonna tell no one 'bout the still I'se swear!"

  "A‘corse yer not, honey," Balls said.

  Starvation had melted her breasts down to nippled flaps. "Cut me loose I'se beggin' ya! I weren't doin' nothin' but walkin' through the woods! Please please please cut me loose!"

  Balls cut the rope binding her ankles.

  "Oh God bless ya bless ya bless ya!" she wheezed. "Nows cut my hands free'n git me away from that evil man!"

  "Shore, baby," Balls said, but then he sat on her belly with his back toward her face. "Dicky! Spread them walkin' sticks wide as ya can!"

  The woman shrieked, her body writhing in the dirt beneath Balls' weight. Dicky reluctantly grabbed her ankles and, struggling against an expected resistance, spread her legs.

  A great mound of bristly black pubic hair sprouted at her crotch.

  "Dang, Dicky. Looks like a hunk'a sod, don't it?"

  "Uh, uh, yeah, Balls, it shore does but, ya know, maybe we shouldn't be doin' this," his friend suggested. "She ain't done nobody no harm. This ain't right."

  "‘A'course it ain't," and then began cutting down there with his Buck. He inscribed the knife tip around the hairy triangle. Now the woman was really screaming, and Balls found that he liked that sound very much. It seemed delicious and warm and delectable.

  Just like the sugar rolls my grandma used to make...

  You could say it was with considerable craft that Balls skinned the woman's pubic mound. He held the ragged triangle of fur up for McKully to see, then flung it away. Blood poured from the wound as if from a bucket, and now the woman, all eighty or so pounds of her, managed to buck so hard, the reflex lifted Balls a good six inches off the ground.

  "Dang," Dicky muttered.

  Balls faced Snot McKully. "Down'n dirty enough fer ya?"

  McKully waved a hand. "Aw, that ain't nothin'. I've scalped gals' pussies before, lots of times. That's the kind'a shit I was doin' fer fun when I was a kid."

  "Well I'm glad you said that, Mr. McKully, 'cos I'm just warmin' up," and then Balls strode over to the jugging table. A side glance showed him the young blonde now sitting on the ground with her baby, offering it one of those cherry-tomato nipples. The baby sucked like someone at the bottom of a milkshake.

  "You shore ya want yer daughter and the baby watchin' this?" he asked McKully.

  McKully just waved a dismissive hand.

  Balls grabbed a jug of moonshine and strode back over. Now the woman was sort of pinwheeling in the dirt, her screams grinding down.

  "Dicky, git me some rope out the ‘Mino."

  Dicky stood in half-shock. "What'cha, what'cha need that fer?"

  "Just git it!"

  Balls uncapped the jug, then—SPLAP!—dumped a plume of 200-proof grain alcohol on the woman's scalped pubis.

  The woman shrieked so loud even Balls jumped back a foot.

  So he wants a ruckin', huh? Down'n dirty-like, huh? Balls spotted something near a pile of broken planks next to a fermenter: an old-fashioned brace-style manual drill. He snatched it up, not realizing that he'd just been touched by something called innovation. He rolled his eyes walking back to the scene, noticing now that the blond teenager was back to filling jugs, while her baby was playing with the pubic scalp.

  Balls straddled the girl again. Her combination of kicks, flails, and screams filled the clearing with a unique dervish of pandemonium. Balls found that he enjoyed the aural effect. "Dicky! I needs ta get this ‘ho simmered down. Sit on her knees."

  Dicky frowned but did as he was told. Now the poor girl was pinned to the ground. Balls put a knee on her cheek, squashing her other cheek into the dirt, and then he started cranking away on the brace-drill. It was tough going at first. That auger-bit turned like a barber pole, making a sound sort of like a meat-grinder, and when it finally ate through her skull, he cranked it into her raw brain about an inch. The girl's screams were extraordinary; they sounded more like a bad wheel bearing than any mode of human protestation. But once that bit sunk in an inch, the screams abated, and her maniacal flailings digressed down to a steady, low-grade convulsion.

  Balls and Dicky stood up, looking down. Balls smiled. "That shore took some spark out of her, huh?"

  "Ya done drilled a hole in her head," Dicky observed with a roiling gut. "But she ain't kicked the bucket. Where'd ya learn that trick?"

  "‘Member 'bout a month ago we'se was in the bar watchin' 'bout that Dahmer fella? He took the zing out'a some'a his victims the same way—said so on the news. Figgure if it's good enough fer him, it's good enough fer me, and see?" Balls gestured an opened hand to the convulsant girl. "Works like a charm."

  Dicky made every effort to keep his eyes from lingering too long on the girl. Her eyes looked up at them, darted back and forth, and her lips moved but uttered no sound. All she did was lie there and tremble. The 3/8th-inch hole in her head effused surprisingly little blood.

  Now the baby, however toothless, was gnawing on the pubic scalp like hairy jerky.

  Dicky's eyes beseeched Snot McKully. "How's that fer a ruckin', Mr. McKully?" hoping the fat moonshiner was satisfied by the demonstration.

  McKully inspected the unfortunate girl from his seat. "Ain't bad but I've seen better."

  Balls guffawed. "What? You think I'm done? Shee-it," and then Balls grabbed that battery brush from the old guy who looked like Larry, and was sitting on the girl's stomach. He tweezed a nipple between his fingers then began to vigorously scour at the flesh with the brush's stiff, iron bristles.

  "How's that, baby? Feel good?"

  The girl's convulsions heightened again, and Balls found that the sensation against his crotch was pleasurable indeed. When the first nipple had been essentially scoured off, he proceeded to the next. All the while, the girl never uttered a sound. She simply convulsed.

  Balls brought his lips down to the bleeding abrasions and began to suck.

  Dicky could only wince. "I think ya done rucked her up enough, Balls... "

  "Naw. Ya kiddin' me?" Red-mouthed, then, Balls got back up and grabbed the rope that Dicky had brought from the vehicle. McKully watched raptly as the girl's ankles were tied to a nearby tree. Then Balls cut another length. "Git in the ‘Mino and start her up, Dicky."

  "Whuh—what?"

  "Go on!"

  Dicky shuffled back to the El Camino and started up the hefty 427 big block.

  Balls made a noose out of one end of the rope and secured it around the girl's neck, then secured the other end to the ‘Mino's trailer hitch. She was still alive but beginning to bleed out.

  "Okay, Dicky-Boy! Let the clutch out! Slow!"

  The ‘Mino's engine revved once, then Dicky slid the Hurst into first. The car chugged forward a few inches at a time, eventually taking up the rope's slack, and when there was no slack left at all, the girl's emaciated frame stretched fully out and rose from the ground.

  "Keep goin', Dicky!" Balls called out over the engine-noise. "Nice'n slow!"

  The girl's eye bugged, her frog-belly-white face going first pink, then heather- blue. Her tongue stuck straight out, then—POP!—a vertebra in her neck g
ave way. Dicky kept inching the ‘Mino forward while the neck stretched like a column of pale taffy. Balls clapped, amused, when the neck stretched out past a foot. The baby watched with a mild curiosity, until—

  POP!

  —her head snapped off and her body thumped to the ground.

  "Good job, Dicky! Shut ‘er down!"

  McKully nodded approval. "Gots to admit, boy. That there was a dang fine ruckin'."

  Balls cut the corpse's ankles free with the Buck, then shot McKully an exaggerated look of dismay. "Well, I'se hope you don't think that's it, Mr. McKully. You don't think I went ta all this trouble to call it quits ‘fore I have me some real fun, do ya?"

  "Well, seein' that you just scalped her pussy, drilled a hole in her skull, and popped her head off, it don't look to me like there's much more you can do."

  "Shee-it," Balls grinned.

  Dicky leaned against the ‘Mino's tailgate, his face going ever paler as he watched Balls flip the corpse over and part the very dead legs.

  Balls dropped his jeans and found an erection hard as a glass-cutter sprouting from his groin. He got on his knees, spread the corpse's buttocks, and spat. When his penis sunk in, his eyes rolled back in the most potent wave of ecstacy, and he proceeded to hump the lifeless rectum with gusto. Aw, shit, that's good... His grin flashed back to McKully, who was actually raising a brow. "See, Mr. McKully, there cain't be no doubt in yer mind that we can do the job, see? I'm fuckin' a headless corpse in the ass, after all. That sounds pretty down'n dirty ta me."

  "I ain't denyin' it, son."

  "I mean, I want'ja to know that I walk it like I talk it."

  "That you do... "

  "I wouldn't want you ta have no reservations 'bout me'n Dicky not bein' bad enough ta work for ya."

  "Ya done proved yer point, son," McKully said.

  Yeah? Balls thought, and then on the next stroke, his orgasm stunned him. His own rectum felt like it was trying to take a breath as his penis dumped a half-dozen big belts of sperm.

  Balls gulped and collapsed on the corpse's back, exhausted, and at once he felt the full force of his epiphany and the ultimate revelation of his newfound calling...

  That was the best nut of my LIFE...

  He pulled his jeans back up, then dusted off his hands. Now his grin toward McKully sharpened to a cunning glare. "Down'n dirty enough for ya, Mr. McKully?"

  "I'd say so."

  "Hardcore enough?"

  "All right, boy, now don't git cocky. I just done admitted ya proved me wrong. Yer badder than I thought. Yer hardcore."

  "Good," Balls gloated. "So's just you watch this... "

  Even McKully looked appalled now. Balls kneeled back between the corpse's legs and spread the buttocks wide. Then—

  "Aw, no, son!" McKully objected. "Don't do that! Ya done proved yer point!"

  Balls wedged his face right into the corpse's ass-crack, guttering muffled laughter, and then planted his lips in a tight circle around the sullied rectum...

  And sucked.

  He sucked hard, good and hard.

  Of course, the girl hadn't been fed in a week, so there wasn't much in the way of fecal matter down there, but there was plenty of pasty, tacky, revolting stink, and there was plenty of something else as well: Balls' semen.

  Balls sucked it all out of her ass right into his mouth. McKully, Dicky, the blond girl, and even the baby stared open-mouthed.

  Balls rose. He picked up the severed head, then spat his own sperm into the dead girl's lips.

  He cast the head aside and grinned right at McKully.

  "Now that, Mr. McKully, is how Tritt Balls Conner puts a ruckin' on a gal."

  (II)

  This is how much of his new novel the Writer had completed in a month's time:

  WHITE TRASH GOTHIC

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a knock at the door. When Nikoff Raskol opened it, he

  That was it. The Writer stared at the lone page in the Remington Model No. 2, dismayed. One and a half damn sentences in a month? Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days! But when the Writer scrutinized that sentence and a half—really just one independent clause, and a prepositional clause, he saw no falseness in it. Time means nothing to true art, he reminded himself. He was one of a privileged lot: a full-time fiction writer. Percy Shelley didn't rush Prometheus Unbound, and Eliot didn't rush Prufrock... And wasn't it Flaubert who said that not only was it the author's luxury to spend the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out, it was also his obligation?

  Yes, the Writer was certain of it.

  "That's enough work for today," he talked to himself and stood up and stretched. He lit a cigarette, opening the shade to let his gaze plummet down to the moonlit junkyard. Small animals which he presumed were rats scurried about the debris, and he could swear the dog defecating next to a junked car was the same dog he's seen doing the same his very first night. A bum staggered about, then plopped down by a heap of trash, opened a bottle of something. After several chugs, he tilted his head, vomited, then continued to imbibe.

  Real life, the Writer thought with some satisfaction. Ideology reduced to material elements and physiological addictions contrary to the ethereal pursuit. Biological mechanism versus determinism...

  Of course, the word "addiction" was subject to interpretation.

  He went to the bathroom, then, and considered his use of the name Nikoff Raskol—the protagonist for his novel—and wondered if it were too obvious a reversion of Dostoevsky's protagonist in Crime and Punishment, the greatest fictional work of existential enlightenment in the history of the written word. Might critics think it trite? The Writer urinated mightily. No. Of course not. Great painters often paid homage to their contemporaries by ingeminating authoritative themes. He flushed the toilet and smiled, knowing beyond all doubt that White Trash Gothic would herald him as the Dostoevsky of the modern age of literature.

  He turned on the old radio, which always drifted off the only classical station he could find. "Jaysus WANTS you to drive fine cars!" an evangelist trumpeted, "because it's Jaysus who rewards the faithful so long as you remember the importance of charity and leave those fine cars to the church in your wills!" The dial pushed through static, then he caught a snippet of moody slide guitars and a man singing, "I will fuck you until you die, bury you and kiss this town goodbye!" The Writer winced—Gracious!— finnicked further, then stumbled on insipid hard rock and some sports stations before he found the following manic voice-warble, asserting, "I could be Raskolnikov, but Mother Nature RIPPED me off!"

  Portents in the wind, he thought, emboldened by the coincidence. Surely it's a sign of Dante's Sisters of the Heavenly Spring, whispering their approval in my ear...

  Then:

  I deserve a drink!

  He left and locked his room, only to turn into a burst of commotion. "Gimme that, you ‘ho!" a chubby blonde girl in holey lingerie snapped at a chubby brunette in holey lingerie: "Fuck you, Irene! It's mine!" and, of course, she pronounced mine as "man." The pair were playing tug-of-war with a box about the size of a box of aluminum foil. The Writer squinted, noticing the words AS SEEN ON TV! printed on the box.

  "It ain't yers!" wailed the blonde. Her breasts and a belly of baby fat bounced. "It's both ours!"

  "Well I'se usin' it now, so's you kin grow a dick'n blow yerself!" but then both girls looked with alarm at the Writer. Their eyes shot wide and their argument abated.

  "Shhh!" whispered the blonde. "It's that famous writer fella! Mrs. Gilman said she'd kick any girl out the house if'n we disturb him."

  "Oh, you're not disturbing me," the Writer ingratiated them. "But harsh words and un-civil gestures are no way to solve a disagreement. What is that, anyway?"

  The blonde handed him the box, which the Writer took after a quick visual surveillance of the large and mostly visible breasts buoyed up in a lacy brassiere. Then he frowned uncomprehending as he turned the long box around in his hands. NOT AV
AILABLE IN STORES! it claimed. The top read WONKO KITCHEN PRODUCTS: THERM-O-FRESH FOOD SAVING SYSTEM! It was one of those kitchen gadgets for keeping leftovers fresh for longer.

  In the Writer's head he made a rare departure from his avoidance of profanity: Why the fuck are two backwoods hookers fighting over THIS? though he didn't feel inclined to ask. "Flipping a coin seems the most fair manner by which to solve your discrepancy, hmm?"

  Both girls begrudgingly nodded.

  The Writer produced a quarter. "You call it," he said to the blonde and flipped.

  "Heads!" the blonde snapped.

  "Aw, you poop-eater, Stacy," sniped the brunette when the Writer caught the coin and showed heads. She thumped off to another room.

  The blonde had won the box. "Thanks!"

  The Writer figured it out: She must have children, and wants to stretch her food budget by saving leftovers.

  "So what'cha write about, Mr. Writer?" she asked in a bouncy enthusiasm.

  The Writer tried not to groan. "Fluctuations of the human condition in an ever-evolving—or de-volving age. I symbolize the tenets of post-Sartrean existentialism in the lives of characters in fiction."

  She looked crosseyed at him. "Is that, like, havin' folks in a story that's made up do real things like what folks in real life experience?"